Anne Wynne, DSDHA: W Awards 2022

The project that I'm presenting today is the National Youth Theatre, which is on Holloway Road in Islington, North London. It was completed last summer. I'd like to present the aim and our approach to this project through these principles, which informed the project. So a central objective of the project was to make the National Youth Theatre's existing Victorian warehouse building on Holloway Road accessible and inclusive. The presence of the NYT on the street has been very significantly improved, with a new pavilion extension that replaces a former car park and bin store. Previously, visitors and students had to access the building via this adjacent alleyway, and we wanted to make a new welcoming entrance on civic scale on Holloway Road. The readabout building is organised around its internal and external public spaces. We designed circulation spaces in the building so that there are also social spaces, city spaces, and there are visual connections and spatial connections between rooms. Externally, the pavilion extension remakes the public realm of the street. The external pavement is an extension of the foyer for visitors to the theatre. At the planning stage of the project, a significant challenge was to demonstrate the suitability of a front extension in the context of a conservation area, but now that the pavilion is built, it's sort of become in itself an expression of the public benefit of the institution to the city. This principle of working with an economy of means has guided the design of the project. We wanted to make the most of what was already there. This attitude helped to shape the project and deliver innovative and sustainable solutions to project-specific challenges as well as to global ones. The overall construction cost of the project across the 2200m2 of the overall building was £2.5 million. The interventions on the site needed to be quite targeted to work within this budget. The single-storey extension, which is highlighted in green on ground floor, covers an area that's less than 100m2, but together with the internal structural alterations, we've doubled the amount of usable studio space that's available to NYT. We opened up the existing building to create naturally-lit lifestyle spaces for training and performance. The structure of the building has been mainly retained, and so it meets the LETI targets for embodied carbon. 90% of the existing superstructure and foundations are reused. Where we have built limited new build elements, we've used high-quality durable materials. This photograph shows the main space in the existing building before its conversion to a flexible theatre and rehearsal space, a studio and a green room. The grid of columns at 5m spacing meant it could only be used by a small group at one time previously, and these were removed and replaced with trusses to support the existing studio space above. Designing these columns has allowed us to make lots of new usable space out of what was essentially already there. A particular challenge of the project was working during COVID, constructing the building during COVID, and some brief changes that came out of that. The client needed to be able to teach remotely, and so to make recordings in the studio spaces, and so new acoustic measures were introduced. This sort of meant that these studio spaces can be used as performance spaces as well, so NYT have their own theatre space for the first time. Across the building, existing finishes have not been changed except where repairs or performance upgrades were particularly necessary. This strategy also helps to retain the informal character of the original warehouse spaces, which makes a neutral backdrop and leaves space for future improvisation by the institution. This idea of leaving the building as it was, was sort of something that also came out of our co-design process with the members of NYT. Consideration of how the building and wider site would be used over time was important. We worked with the NYT to develop this idea of a spatial sharing network whereby when NYT studio spaces aren't in use, they can be rented out to West End companies. This strategy also encourages informal chance encounters between staff, students, and visiting companies, and helps students to make connections with people in the industry. The presence of the new extensional hallway road has also made a big difference to the atmosphere and feeling of safety on the street at night time, which is important. The principles that I've been talking about around the National Youth Theatre are also relevant to other projects I'm working on at the moment and the types of projects I'd like to work on in future. So we hope that phase two of the National Youth Theatre will start soon and will be focused in particular on the external public spaces. I'd like to be able to continue to prioritise projects that are concerned with both architecture and landscape. This is a project I worked on at the same time as the National Youth Theatre for the Broadgate Estate at Exchange Square. This year I've also been working as a part of the team as a public space consultant on the design of the British Library extension, working with RSHP, which has helped us to shape external and some of the internal public spaces in this new building.